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Digitization makes possible the on-line publishing of educational and scientific publications, for which the latest information is essential. Some U.S. universities distribute specific textbooks gathering a selection of chapters selected in an extensive database and some professors' articles and commentaries.
Moreover, with the Internet, it is possible to read on-line titles which are difficult to find in newsstands, like the Algerian daily newspaper El Watan, on-line since October 1997.
The Photo Gallery presents the Marx and Engels clan from 1839 to 1894, and their dwellings from 1818 to 1895. The MEIA Search allows searching in the entire Marx/Engels Internet Library. "As larger works come on-line, they will also have small search pages made for them alone for instance, Capital will have a search page for that work alone."
It includes: an index of more than 7,000 on-line books on the Internet, which can be browsed by author, by title or by subject; pointers to significant directories and archives of on-line texts; and special exhibits. From the main search page, users have options to search for four types of media: books, music, art, and video. Serials can be at least as important as books in library research.
These figures, while not totally representative or complete, do indicate a general trend, which is that when newspapers add on-line services to their activities, jobs are created." However it is difficult to admit that the information society would generate jobs, and it is already stated worldwide that multimedia convergence leads to massive loss of jobs.
Library 2000 was a computer systems research project that explored the implications of large-scale on-line storage using the future electronic library as an example. The project was pragmatic, developing a prototype using the technology and system configurations expected to be economically feasible in the year 2000.
With the Internet as a main information provider and the quick development of digital libraries, what is the future of librarians? Will they become cyberlibrarians, or will they disappear because the public will not need them any more when all the information and documents they need will be available on-line?
Even if audiovisual and video techniques are more and more present in the on-line press, the most important thing is still its content, as Jean-Pierre Cloutier, the editor of the Chroniques de Cybérie, reminded us in his e-mail of June 8, 1998: "For the Chroniques de Cybérie, we could launch and maintain a formula because of the relatively low entry costs in this medium.
The National Academy Press has already put 1,700 of its books on-line, and is finding that the electronic versions of some books have boosted sales of the hard copy monographs often by two to three times the previous level. It's 'great advertising', says the Press's director. The MIT Press is experiencing similar results: 'For each of our electronic books, we've approximately doubled our sales.
The Internet is impinging on many peoples' lives and Information Managers are the best people to help researchers around the labyrinth. The Internet is just in its infancy and we are all going to be witnesses to its growth and refinement." Its different sections are: reference; exhibits; especially for librarians; magazines and serials; newspapers; on-line texts; and Web searching.
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